This invention relates to a resilient miniature mechanical support that can also serve as a electrical connector for establishing a mechanical support between two parallel spaced-apart surfaces and optionally also provide an electrical path between the two such surfaces.
Modern electronics often contain circuitry formed on a plurality of stacked layers/boards, e.g. between two printed circuit boards (PCB), two substrates with patterned metalization, or between two layers of a microwave module or integrated circuit. Where multiple stacked surfaces are used, there exists a need to provide a resilient mechanical support therebetween and for some applications couple electrical signals from circuitry on one layer to another layer. One straightforward approach for coupling electrical signals is to use a conventional wire or wire bond between the respective conductive pads on the two adjacent layers. In another approach, a plurality of rigid perpendicular conductive pins extend from one layer and are in alignment with corresponding receptacles or holes in the other layer to establish electrical connections that may or may not be soldered after the connections are engaged.
Fuzz buttons and solder bumps placed between layers have also been utilized to establish connections with respectively aligned contacts on adjacent parallel layers. However, fuzz buttons are normally time-consuming to install and may be tedious to assemble. Solder bumps require subsequent heating and if several such connections are required, uneven heating or differences in characteristics among the solder bumps may yield unreliable or inconsistent connections. The disassembly of layers connected using either of these techniques for maintenance or repair of the circuitry may result in even greater difficulties where such interconnections are required to be manually reestablished during reassembly of the respective layers. Additionally, the minimum practical size of these types of connectors may negatively impact the performance of RF circuits above a frequency, e.g. above 20 GHz. Thus, there exists a need for an improved mechanical support that can also serve as an electrical interconnector that minimizes such difficulties.